Does it sound familiar to you? Are you using Excel as word processing tool?

If you have experienced the task shown above, you should know how tedious and time-consuming it could be as you cannot convert each line into bullet point by clicking one button as if in Word or PowerPoint.

Having understood what Ctrl+J and Alt+7 does, it’s easy to understand what we did in the Find and Replace dialogue box. We instructed Excel to Find all line break in the selection; then replace it with a line bread AND a round bullet.

However we are only 90% done. As you see the action performed did not take care of the first line in cell because the beginning of first line is not a result of a line break. So how to tackle that?

Here comes another formatting trick

Select the range

Right Click –> Format Cell

Custom format:

@by typing Alt+7 (on numpad) followed by @

(Note: you may leave a space in-between or not depending how you would like to present your bullet points, but at least it should be consistent what you did to the rest.)

As simple as this. 🙂

Having said that, if we are talking about only a few cells, I would actually suggest you add the bullet to the first line cell by cell because custom format can drive some people nuts. 😛

Excel is not intended for word processing. So better not to complain its stupidity in area of word processing.